Michael Moynihan reviews a book by someone he really dislikes:
In 2003, the New York Times declared Eric Hobsbawm “one of the great British historians of his age, an unapologetic Communist and a polymath whose erudite, elegantly written histories are still widely read in schools here and abroad.” The Spectator, a right-leaning British magazine, gushed that Hobsbawm is “arguably our greatest living historian—not only Britain’s, but the world’s.” The Nation anointed him “one of Aristotle’s ‘men of virtue.’ “
That the 94-year-old Mr. Hobsbawm has long championed dictatorial regimes hasn’t diminished his standing among the intelligentsia or within the establishment he so obviously loathes. In 1998, Queen Elizabeth II bestowed upon him a Companion of Honour — “In action faithful and in honour clear.” But even many of Mr. Hobsbawm’s admirers find his slippery defenses of communism discomfiting.
To his critics, his ideological dogmatism has made him an untrustworthy chronicler of the 20th century. The British historian David Pryce-Jones argues that Mr. Hobsbawm has “corrupted knowledge into propaganda” and is a professional historian who is “neither a historian nor professional.” Reading his extravagantly received 1994 book, “The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991,” the celebrated Kremlinologist Robert Conquest concluded that Mr. Hobsbawm suffers from a “massive reality denial” regarding the Soviet Union.
I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community.
